This is a fascinating (and somewhat horrifying) case study of how quickly a conversation can become negative online when geotargeted posts go awry. The Coca-Cola Facebook page, which has 33 million fans, geotargets its updates based on country and language. All standard fare for big brands, and it appears to be very effective for Coke.
Late last week, Coke accidentally posted an update in Portuguese to their entire Facebook audience. The post was supposed to be targeted to Brazil only. It was rather innocuous – talking about student day activities. The response from the community was anything but innocuous.
It’s unclear whether the post was just an accidental push by a community manager or an error on the part of their CMS, but what resulted was a full-blown page meltdown. The page was barraged by a series of xenophobic comments about English first and English only. The comments are aggressive and offensive to say the least.
After a few hours of vitriol, Coke took the post down because they said it was an accidental post and never should have been posted to the broader community. I figure that they thought this would be easier than scrubbing all of the negative comments individually and then facing the backlash from these individuals (even though they were clearly in violation of their house rules).
Ad Age has a good run-down of the play-by-play. There’s an opportunity to draw a number of important lessons here as well:
- Crisis Response – You must be hypervigilant in monitoring your pages and have a crisis plan in place for instances such as this. For example, there should be pre-approved language explaining if a post is accidentally posted to the wrong audience. You should also review your house rules to see what you would have done in such a situation.
- Segmentation – The interests, norms and sensitivities of different subsegments of your Facebook audience can be vastly different. One size does not fit all. Segmentation is the right approach for communicating with diverse audiences, particularly if there are substantive language differences and preferences among your audience members. (This does not justify xenophobic comments. But even minor differences in interests or norms can make a difference in how a post is perceived.)
- Geotargeting – As Facebook continues to become a more international, global platform, geotargeting will become even more important, as will posts in multiple languages. While the US Facebook audience grew by 4% last year, Brazil (Portuguese) grew by 23% and India (Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, etc.) grew by 11%. Following and tailoring your engagement to align with the growth of your audience among people in specific countries – and even cities – can be an effective way to deepen relationships with your fans.
- Brand Consistency – Even if you geotarget your posts, you should be aware of the impact and perceptions on your broader audience. Programs should be tailored for local communities but still complement the master narrative for the brand. The same goes for applications, contests or general content on a country-specific page. For example, last year when the country-specific page for one beauty brand posted a skin-whitening application, people around the world weighed-in in scorn. Local stories, local applications and local controversies don’t stay local for long. The activities of your local divisions, employees and community managers impact the perception of your brand globally. You have one reputation. Protect it through smart guidance and sensible governance of your social channels.
We will be watching the situation continue to unfold. Lessons abound. How would you have responded?
Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Coke on Facebook and even more of a fan of Facebook in my refrigerator. I’m from the south which means I drink copious amounts of the stuff. My addiction has been made only more pronounced since Cherry Coke Zero came out. I don’t think Coke is an Edelman client, but if it is, I don’t work on the business, nor does this post reflect Edelman’s view of the company.
